Helpful JSON tools for APIs
These are tricks we use when using the APIs.
jq
is a lightweight and flexible command line JSON parser. It supports colored terminal output, and filtering for JSON documents.
# API Call
$ curb -H 'Authorization: xxx' 'https://api.adnxs.com/segment' | jq '.response.segments[] | {id, short_name}'
# API Response Example
{
"id": 1,
"short_name": "cookie_birthday"
}
{
"id": 123,
"short_name": "creative_macro_test_seg"
}
{
"id": 456,
"short_name": "In-Market Users"
}
JQ can be downloaded and installed from: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
json_reformat
formats your output nicely without reordering the fields, and is easily installed via most standard Linux Distros
$ curl -b cookies -c cookies 'https://api.adnxs.com/creative' | json_reformat
If it doesn't work for you, try yum install yajl
. If you are using a mac and do not have yum, you can use macports to install json_reformat
. Make sure you have xcode and macports downloaded and installed and then run sudo port install yajl
. If you get an error message, follow the instructions given.
This is a nice JSON verifier: https://www.jsonlint.com/.
From Firefox: Normally when encountering a JSON document (content type "application/json"), Firefox simply prompts you to download the file. With the JSONView extension, JSON documents are shown in the browser similar to how XML documents are shown. The document is formatted, highlighted, and arrays and objects can be collapsed. Even if the JSON document contains errors, JSONView will still show the raw text.